Everyone on the edge of the Grand Canyon was afraid his neighbor, his friend, would jump. I liked to imagine jumping. I ran for the edge, vaulted the guard rail, flung myself into space, feet first, sleeves flapping.
—David Reed
Gagosian New York is pleased to present an exhibition of early brushmark paintings by David Reed. Curated by Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, this presentation follows the exhibition’s premiere at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. This is Reed’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 reunites many canvases first shown in 1975 at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, which had a strong impact on Christopher Wool, then a young artist. More than forty years later, Reed’s paintings are complemented by a group exhibition of artists who were similarly exploring the relationship between process and image-making in painting, sculpture, photography, and film.
When Reed came to New York from Southern California in the 1960s, he entered an art world that was skeptical about painting’s ability to be forward-looking. The young artist sympathized with the humanist, even metaphysical current in the work of painters like his teachers Philip Guston and Milton Resnick, even as he admired the deadpan materiality of contemporaneous experiments in sculpture and film. Seeking to make paintings that were as direct as a poured-steel sculpture, between 1974 and 1975 he prepared tall, vertical canvases, either as single panels or as many as five panels bolted together; the height of the canvases was determined by the door to his studio, the widths by the limit of his own reach. Working wet into wet, Reed then painted primarily black or red strokes from left to right, top to bottom, and sometimes diagonally, quickly filling the canvas.
